In the Spotlight: Will take Obama calculus over cowboy arithmetic

Friday

May 9, 2014 at 5:54 PMMay 9, 2014 at 6:01 PM

Marc C. Young

So much time has passed since President Obama’s “red line” statement that one might be excused for thinking it is no longer relevant. Yet it seems to become more important every day. Articles about events in Syria, the Israel/Palestinian conflict, in Crimea and now the rest of Ukraine have all referred to President Obama’s “red line.”

So, looking closely at this comment may be instructive about the president and, perhaps, his critics as well.

The actual statement was this: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

I was shocked to discover that there was no direct correlation made between the red line and military action.

Now, as a country we were much more accustomed to the cowboy arithmetic of George W. Bush & Co. His formula was 1 plus 0 — 1 being the Bush/Cheney administration and 0 being the number of WMDs that we found after the “essential” invasion of Iraq — equals “bomb them to hell.”

Perhaps it’s time to graduate from specious arithmetic to Obama calculus. Perhaps a change in calculus represents a desired trait. Perhaps it’s the type of foreign policy “plan” that the U.S needs after 10-plus years of senseless war. Perhaps rallying support among countries, pushing harder for consensus of nations, and seeking and utilizing effective economic sanctions just might be more reasoned — if more complex — than putting American souls at risk and spending billions of dollars.

I know many Democrats who gave Bush the benefit of the doubt, thinking there might be some value to the “cowboy diplomacy” that kept the world guessing as to when the U.S. would engage our military to protect another people’s homeland, only to find that the cowboy kept riding into the sunset with no true “plan,” just rhetoric and outright deception.

Perhaps Obama’s foreign policy is the application of a calculus that results in actually not applying military force and costing American lives. Perhaps it entails analyzing the problem in depth, considering all options, and walking away. Perhaps this is what real planning looks like. It just isn’t arithmetic.